Reel to Real: Does Spielberg Need Gen Z?

Does Steven Spielberg need Gen Z? It’s a fair question, considering the devastating second weekend box office drops that blockbusters “The Mandalorian and Grogu” and “Masters of the Universe” had recently due, in part, to a complete lack of interest from the younger generation.

Spielberg’s original sci-fi film “Disclosure Day,” his first summer opening since 2016’s “The BFG,” topped the box office with a solid $44 million domestic this weekend, but it did so with an older-skewing audience: Just 17% of the weekend crowd was under the age of 25.

It’s not surprising. The oldest Gen Z-er was five years old when “Minority Report” and “Catch Me If You Can” hit theaters, and their formative years were shaped more by Christopher Nolan and Marvel than Spielberg.

And perhaps that’s just fine. Millennials, Gen X and Boomers turned out for “Disclosure Day,” and there’s a world in which the older demographic — which doesn’t necessarily rush to see things opening weekend — boosts the overall gross of the $115 million thriller. And you can’t say Universal didn’t try to court the young crowd, as Spielberg did more podcast interviews and cinephile-friendly press than he ever has before.

Universal also has a robust post-theatrical pipeline, including a lucrative PVOD business and a licensing deal with Netflix. So “Disclosure Day” will be seen by many — eventually.

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But in a theatrical landscape where “movies for grownups” are few and far between at the theaters, the opening weekend demographics are interesting.

It’s a curious time for the filmmakers from the ’70s and early ’80s who formed so much of our modern cinematic language. Martin Scorsese managed to squeeze through two wildly expensive streaming epics to wild acclaim (“The Irishman” and “Killers of the Flower Moon”) in the last decade. But Francis Ford Coppola invested over $120 million of his own money for the critically derided bomb “Megalopolis,” and Brian De Palma hasn’t made a movie since 2019’s “Domino.”

Spielberg has always been the most commercial of the bunch, but even he struggled to get a studio to back “West Side Story,” which nearly went to streaming. As generations shift and tastes change — and Gen Z is signaling it craves original, edgy films — where the legends of cinema sit in the consumer marketplace becomes a fascinating question.

Although it has to be said that Spielberg will be A-OK. Even if “Disclosure Day” has a more blockbuster-y plot engine, it’s still a deeply personal film about the filmmaker’s relationship to extraterrestrial life and, at heart, is a plea for empathy. He’s rarely made movies that are “just for fun,” but “Disclosure Day” is right in the pocket of the director’s more thematically complicated fare as of late like “The Fabelmans” and “The Post.”

In other words, “Disclosure Day” is exactly the movie he wanted to make.

Now, on to the rest of this week’s Reel to Real column as we tackle how the “Obsession” profits are being divided up, why Lionsgate decided to launch a boutique Blu-ray label now, the next Kane Parsons/Curry Barker and more in this week’s newsletter.